Political Scene: What Obama Is Still Getting Wrong

Has the White House misdiagnosed the cause of Tuesday’s Republican wins? President Obama’s press conference yesterday indicates that he may have, says Ryan Lizza, who joins Hendrik Hertzberg and Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast. “He seems to think that the public turned against him because he failed to deliver on his campaign promise of changing how Washington works,” Lizza says. But the real problem is the economy.

If there is a single thing he could have done better, it would have been to get unemployment down to show the public that the economy was getting better, and the only thing that I’ve seen that could have done that was a much, much larger stimulus.

Hertzberg doubts that a bigger stimulus would have gotten through Congress, but says that Obama should have done a better job of managing expectations:

It was always going to be a long twilight struggle against this economic catastrophe, and the President really didn’t do enough to educate and prepare the public for that.

So how can Obama recapture the public enthusiasm that launched him into office? Hertzberg says that spirit “burned away in the cauldron of the realities of the way our government works.” And without that audience, the Obama show looks a lot less appealing.

It’s a very different thing to be a cool customer in front of a wildly excited crowd of a hundred thousand; there’s a bracing contrast between his coolness and calm and the excitement and passion of the crowd. Take the crowd away, and you’ve got something that feels like an inappropriate response to mass suffering. So I don’t know what the hell he does, frankly.